Syria crisis, Egypt standoff, Libya election - 9 July 2012

International envoy Kofi Annan met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and foreign minister Walid Muallem in Damascus on 9 July. He was accompanied by the head of the UN's supervision mission Robert Mood (in uniform). (AP Photo/SANA) Photograph: Anonymous/AP

Syria

•International envoy Kofi Annan has travelled to Tehran for talks with Iran's leaders in his bid to revive efforts to end the violence in Syria. Earlier he suggested that Syria's president Bashar al-Assad had agreed to political dialogue only if the Syrian agreed to a truce. The agreed approach will be discussed with the armed opposition, Annan said.

•Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has held talks with Syrian opposition leader Michel Kilo in Moscow. Kilo is reported to have told a Russian radio station that the defected general Manaf Tlass could play a role in a transition government.

Libya

•Libya's former interim prime minister Mahmoud Jibril has won a landslide victory in the country's first democratic election, provisional figures show, defying expectations that the Muslim Brotherhood would sweep to power. Jibril, a moderate who led Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC) last year, won a clear majority of votes across much of the country, early polling station returns suggest. He is reported to have have wonaround 80% in the capital, Tripoli, with strong results in the south and 60% in Benghazi, the eastern city that was the NTC's base during the uprising that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi.

3.33pm:Syria: Annan's spokesman has emailed a little more from Tehran. He quoted his boss saying:

I am happy to be back in Iran. I am here to discuss the situation in Syria - as you know, there was an Action Group for Syria meeting in Geneva at the end of last month - and to see how we can work together to help settle the situation in Syria.

Annan suggested that Iran should be invited to the talks in Geneva, but the US and the UK objected.

3.30pm:Syria: Kofi Annan's spokesman has just confirmed that the international envoy has landed in Tehran for talks about Syria.

The joint special envoy for Syria, Kofi Annan, arrived in Tehran for talks with Iranian leaders.

He did no elaborate.

3.08pm:Syria: Syrian opposition leader Michel Kilo has suggested that the defected general Manaf Tlass could potentially play a role in a transition government in Syria.

Kilo is reported to have made the comment in an interview with the Voice of Russian before meeting Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov today.

11.46am:Bahrain: Prominent rights activist Nabeel Rajab, has been sentenced to three months in prison, over a tweet against the prime minister which the court said insulted Bahrainis, Reuters reports.

Rajab, head of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, spent three weeks in jail in June under investigation after suggesting in a tweet that residents of the Muharraq district had only made a recent show of support for Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman for financial gain.

A complaint over that and other tweets against the prime minister, who has been in his post since 1971, was made by a group of retired army and security officers who are seen as pro-government.

Rajab has been a key figure in organising protests during 16 months of unrest in the Gulf Arab state as majority Shia lead calls for democratic reforms to limit the powers of the ruling Sunni Al Khalifa family.

The judge said the time Rajab has already spent in jail would count towards the sentence, Rajab's lawyer Mohammed al-Jishi said. Jishi said Rajab would lodge an appeal and it was not clear if he would be taken to jail or remain free.

"Every day there are a thousand people insulting a thousand people, this isn't logical. Normally the charge of insult leads to just a fine. So for me it's a surprise," Jishi said.

11.29am:Egypt: The speaker of Egypt's parliament has called for members of the lower house to meet on Tuesday, after Morsi's decision to reverse an army order to dissolve the assembly, Reuters reports.

11.06am:Syria: Kofi Annan claims President Assad has agreed to go ahead with a political dialogue in Syria.

But he suggested Assad would only agree to a political settlement if the opposition agreed to lay down weapons.

In a brief statement, issued after his talks in Damascus, Annan also urged world leaders to get behind the political initiative.

The statement said:

I've just had a very candid and constructive discussion with President Assad. We discussed the need to end the violence and ways and means of doing so. We agreed on an approach which I will share with the armed opposition. I also stressed the importance of moving ahead with a political dialogue which the president accepts.

President Assad reassured me of the government's commitment to the six-point plan which, of course, we should move ahead to implement in a much better fashion than has been the situation so far.

So I am leaving Syria but we will continue our dialogue and, as I said, the approach we have discussed about ending the violence will also be shared with the armed opposition. I have a team here on the ground that will continue to do that. I also encourage governments and other entities with influence to have a similar effort.

He said the results appear to represent a triumph of pragmatism over religious ideology.

"No one is any doubt that Jibril has won, and that Libya has gone a different way from Tunisia and Egypt," Luke said via Skype.

He added:

There have been predictions, more or less everywhere, that the Islamists would sweep to power in Libya as they did in neighbouring Tunisia and in Egypt, but that hasn't happened. What has happened, we think, is that Mahmoud Jibril, who is a moderate and the former interim prime minister, has won a landslide.

Talking to people on the streets of Tripoli, nine out of ten people said they voted for him [Jibril's National Forces Alliance]. Leaks suggest he got about 80% of Tripoli. He did well in other parts of the country, including Benghazi. He did less well in Misrata. He appears to have won, but the system is confusing. The new national congress, which will run Libya, has 200 seats, 80 of these go to political parties and 120 will go to individual candidates ... The big picture is that Jibril has won and the Muslim Brotherhood have done less well.

Asked if powerful local militias would respect the results, Luke said:

There are problems, there are weapons, there are militias. But what there is a desire among Libyans to fix their problems and sort things out. Huge numbers [of people] voted very enthusiastically over the weekend. I don't think you can say Libya is a success story, but nor is this Iraq, nor is this Afghanistan. It has got a very different vibe. At the moment I am cautiously optimistic.

In most of the country polling was peaceful, he said.

After an attack on polling stations the elections commission got its act together and reopened these stations. In fact on the streets of Benghazi there were celebrations by pro-election people. So I don't think the violence was fatal to the whole project and in the rest of the country, the elections were entirely peaceful, which given the fact that there was a revolution and a huge war here less than a year ago is quite remarkable.

Asked to explain Jibril's apparent success, Luke said:

Libya is a homogeneous society, so there are none of the sectarian issues that you get in Iraq or Syria. Also there's a pragmatism. The thing about Jibril is that he understands commerce, he's good at business. People realise that if this country is going to function as a unified state it needs entrepreneurialism, it needs business, it needs inward investment. They've decided that Jibril is the man for that. It is interesting that this pragmatism has triumphed over more ideological concerns. There are people who are ideological conservatives here, but they are very much in the minority, and they don't appear to have done especially.

Some results are expected this evening, but the majority of results will come on Tuesday and Wednesday and the final outcome should be known by the end of the week, Luke said. But he pointed out that the country is on LMT "Libya Maybe Time".

Anti-Assad activists in Syria reported army shelling and clashes with rebels on Monday in Deir Ezzor, Deraa, Homs, Aleppo and a neighbourhood of Damascus. Residents also reported the sound of gunfire in the capital.

An activist website said over 100 Syrians had been killed on Sunday, most of them civilians.

"Early reports show that the coalition is leading the polls in the majority of constituencies," the secretary general of the National Forces Alliance, Faisal Krekshi, said.

The leader of one of Libya's main Islamist parties acknowledged that the rival coalition had the advantage in the country's two largest cities.

8.27am: (all times BST) Welcome to Middle East Live.

Something of a triple-header today: international envoy Kofi Annan is due to meet Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian capital Damascus; Egypt's President Mohamed Morsi has defied the military council by ordering the dissolved parliament to meet; and early indications from Libya's election suggest a defeat for Islamist parties.

We know that (Annan) is coming up against countless obstacles but his plan should not be allowed to fail, it is a very good plan. The biggest obstacle is that many countries do not even want this plan to succeed so they offer political support and continue to provide the terrorists in Syria with arms and money.

There is no doubt that the opposition is getting more effective in their defence of themselves and in going on the offence against the Syrian military and the Syrian Government's militias.

So the future, to me, should be abundantly clear to those who support the Assad regime: The days are numbered; and the sooner there can be an end to the violence and a beginning of a political transition process, not only will fewer people die, but there's a chance to save the Syrian state from a catastrophic assault that would be very dangerous not only to Syria but to the region.

So I think Special Envoy Annan was admitting the obvious, that as of today he's not been able to convince the Syrian Government and those supporting it to wake up and recognize the path they are on, but that there is still time. And as we saw with the recent high-level defection, with the increasing numbers of defections, the sand is running out of the hourglass.

•Barack Obama has invited Morsi to the US and pledged a "new partnership" with Egypt. The official visit will take place to coincide with the general assembly of the United Nations, Egyptian aide Yasser Ali said following a meeting between Morsi and US deputy secretary of state William Burns. The move reflects attempts by the White House to cultivate new ties between Washington and the country's ruling Islamists following the recent election.